https://fryars.co.uk

Fryars is one of the most interesting acts I’m working on at the moment. He is a very intelligent artist with an incredibly creative vision for his career.

We launched his website as a very low-key and mysterious holding page designed by Kate Brighouse. Don’t let the simplicity of the design fool you, there is a lot going on behind the scenes.

The page was launched just before the premier of Fryars’ latest single ‘Cool Like Me’. I wrote a php script to determine the date and time so we could trigger a different response after the song aired on radio for the first time.

For a few days, hovering over (or touching) the door would reveal a box with 10.07.13.19.00 written in it. Clicking on the door would play a tiny instrumental snippet of the song.

Once the date and time passed clicking on the door would launch a Soundcloud player to stream the track.

The site has a YouTube video on the home page, and I didn’t want the YouTube and Soundcloud players to clash. I used the APIs from both services to ensure that clicking on the door would pause the YouTube video and closing the ‘Cool Like Me’ page would pause the soundcloud player.

The page had a very specific design so, rather than making it responsive, I used the device meta tag to set the correct page width across devices.

I have a lot of creative ideas for the Fryars website and look forward to rolling them out. Be sure to keep checking https://fryars.co.uk for fascinating updates.